Ten years is a long time for an album to sit unfinished, but that’s the story behind This Monologue Conversation, the third record from I Plead Irony, out September 4th. Rauf Jordan, Paul McDonald and Lawrence Arnold have been playing together in various forms since 2004, and by the time most of this record was tracked with Guillaume Doussaud at Swan Sound Studio in France, life got in the way: Lawrence’s job pulled him into heavy travel, then the pandemic arrived, and the band effectively stopped existing for a while. That gap changed how some of the songs read. “Inside the Lines,” originally written about the constraints people impose on themselves, took on a much larger social weight once Rauf revisited it post-pandemic, and “History,” a song he says nearly wrote itself, felt considerably more unsettling in hindsight given its focus on progress and reversal. The album’s title, borrowed unexpectedly from a whisky vlogger’s turn of phrase, continues a tradition of self-contradicting titles that stretches back to their debut, This Statement Is False.
The album starts out with a really strong first impression. “Architect Effect” is a four-minute song that has more music packed into it than some full albums, opening with a terrifyingly heavy riff synchronized between guitar and bass before refusing to just settle into repetition, instead telling a whole story through sharp songwriting, pacing, rich harmony, and shifting dynamics all the way through. That’s largely true of the record as a whole, though the opener sets the tone hard enough that it hits hardest right out of the gate.
There’s a stretch through the middle where the songs start to blur together somewhat, a sense of homogeneity that sets in listening track by track, until “Undone” snaps things back into focus. It carries incredible momentum from the moment it starts and grabs the imagination through arrangement alone, building a genuinely beautiful melodic throughline despite likely being the rhythmically simplest song on the record. “Death By Internal Combustion” stands out even further, running almost seven minutes with a 40-second spoken-word intro before shifting into Tom Morello, Rage Against the Machine-style riffing, and from there the song moves through multiple style changes that somehow flow together rather than feeling disjointed. Coming second to last in the tracklist, it plays like the album’s real culmination even though it isn’t technically the closer.
That honor belongs to “Falling Upwards,” written last and built around a distinction the band clearly cares about: not climbing toward hope through effort, but falling into it through love and connection instead. It’s a fitting way to close an album that survived distance, a pandemic, and its own band’s disappearance to actually get finished. This Monologue Conversation earns its decade-long gestation, and songs like “Architect Effect,” “Undone,” and “Death By Internal Combustion” make clear why these three friends refused to let it stay unfinished.
